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phone book.
     
    I rubbed my eyes, then stopped to fix eggs, sloppily poaching them since I’d forgotten to get butter or oil. No salt.
     
    6. Buy salt, oil, pepper, flour, beans, cornmeal, frozen greens, fatback, bread.
    7. Find out more about Carstairs.
     
    I wasn’t sure about that last. Maybe I’d better not meddle? If he suspected Alex wasn’t human but had no proof, he’d be considered nuts if he babbled about dope-smoking aliens watching the sunset from Lawrence Laboratory.
     
    8. See how lonely I had to be before I’d look up Black Amber’s Berkeley contacts.
     
    For a moment, I wanted to get caught, ease the tension of leading a false life. But my brain threw me a quick memory of two guys fucking in the prison bunk beside me—nobody doing a thing even though it was almost a rape. Warren’s friends had watched out for me. And I had to kick hard once.
    Most of the time, I blotted out my jail memories. Sitting in Berkeley with a new past, I shuddered— no, I don’t want to do prison again and— checked my list over before I went out.
    Yucko weather, fog a fine mist in the air. I’d never seen such summer weather on Karst or Yauntra. I found the bank, on Shattuck down from the Co-op buildings going toward the campus. The woman smiled hyper-friendly at me once she punched in my social security number. I thought I was about to get busted, but she said, “Tom, you’ve got $25,000 in electronic transfer funds waiting. Do you need a credit card?”
    “I’ve never had one before.”
    “Well, I’ll take your application.”
    I pulled out my passport to fill out where I was supposed to have lived during the last four years. But my alleged past hurt my credit rating with even a liberal bank. No VISA card, but I could get guaranteed balance checking, as long as I kept $5,000 minimum in savings.
    So, phone deposit $250, PG&E $200. I could see that $25,000 in Berkeley wasn’t altogether much.
    Computer and radio. I decided I really needed a radio, company-like. Maybe hook a voice reader recorder into the radio, so I’d be warned if any radio program announced the arrest of aliens— hey, maybe get a police scanner.
    Maybe Carstairs is another one of us?
    I doubted that. And voice readers, that was a bit paranoid.
    About noon, I cut up Hearst toward the campus, walked through a redwood grove, and continued on, just looking at things—the old university buildings, brick, and the new ones, pastel metal and glass. The students looked like any alien students with backpacks and pocket computers, maybe weirder face hair, agitated like Gwyngs. A provincial university, I thought in Karst I. Nah, it’s bigger’n Tech, a Virginia educated lobe of my brain replied in low English.
    Suddenly I only noticed women—guys faded into the bricks—and got a hard on for all the human women, visible and invisible. My cock would explode if I walked farther.
    I thought about Yangchenla’s nastiest crack about me and Black Amber. No, Yangchenla, I never slept with an alien. The blood backed out of my cock. I asked a girl in a long blowing white dress “Where do I get a library card?”
    Her face did a subtle freeze shift— oh, he’s not a student. She pointed to a huge, obvious building about a hundred yards away and walked off.
    “Thanks anyhow,” Bitches, human women.
    The library crew fingerprinted me again, with clear jelly that only made prints on treated paper, and took a mug shot for the ID card. Then after their computer checked me for outstanding fines, they gave me a booklet that explained the various libraries all over campus on all the subjects that I could use. I asked about computer compatibility with the library’s software.
    “Go to Computer Mart,” a woman said, “and tell them you want UCal compatibility. It’ll be seventy five dollars a month for modem linkup. Call in when you’ve got your system.”
    I looked at my fingertips to see if the graft lines were visible. Nope, the Barcons had done good